Decided to say farewell (at least for now) to
X-Wing Collector's CD-ROM after completing first 3 campaigns. Good game and a must-play for any 3d-pseudo-sim subgenre fan, but I just had enough.
Good:
- Great for its time 3D engine, which makes the game still playable (as opposed to early 2D Wing Commanders with their flat enemies and asteroids),
- A groundwork for even better, later games (Tie, Archimedean Dynasty, Freespace).
- Hard as dinosaur's balls.
Bad:
- Some missions are IMO technically broken (invisible mines that shoot at you).
- Missions with infinite enemy respawn, and you never know if current mission is this type. At least without using a walkthrough...
- Fucking escort missions, mang.
Ugly (mostly technicalities):
- 320x240 res is too low for a decent 3D shooting action, IMO. Half the time you fly in the direction of a radar echo, spotting an enemy the size of 2 pixels in last 5 seconds of the dogfight. FOV is too narrow due to this as well, which means you have to turn around much more than in games with higher res.
- No target indicator for enemy which is outside of the HUD. You have to switch your eyes from hud to radar and back all the time. Minor, but such trackers are present in probably all later games of this type.
- No clear mission goals for many missions (happens often in these games, I must say). Most of the time you have to fail mission to learn from the debriefing screen about shit that needs to be done to complete mission. I prefer clear objectives ("object X must survive mission!") to the descriptive, immersive bullshit ("The convoy was leaving the system, when suddenly... Blah blah blah").
- Ally AI is dumb as fuck - for example it will keep hitting you if you're in the lane of fire (tailing same enemy).
- Some missions are clearly too hard and depend on luck (like the one where you have to protect a shuttle against over 9000 Tie-interceptors). Fuck this spergish bullshit, give me interesting mission design, where something actually happens, instead.
Verdict:
and a fucking half.
Finished
SMT - Digital Devil Saga 2
Good:
- More of the good old SMT dungeon crawlan'.
- Press turns system FTW. Simple, yet fun.
- Some bosses were really interesting (to murder).
- Some reintroduced oldschool elements: dark and damage zones, proper mazes filled with teleporters and one-way doors, etc.
Bad:
- Longass elevator animations are still in.
- Story is much worse than in part 1, turning into facepalmish shit near the end.
Ugly:
- Grid is nice idea, but makes unlocking crucial skills (dekaja, dekunda) unnecessarily hard (without using FAQs, OFC), since you have to find them first. Linear skill progression menu from first game was much clearer IMO.
- Rings are nice idea as well, too bad that there are like 3-4 useful ones (void some shit). Upgrading them is a joke too.
- Enemies use combos way too rarely.
- Way too often enemies are grouped into "boring" teams (samefags, very easy to kill using combos / multi-targeted spells).
BTW, I was using my cheat, which reduces random encounter rate by half, but doubles the Atma (skills) EXP. No problems whatsoever, except some boss battles being TENSE. :D
Verdict:
and a fucking three quarters